Multiple Henry James’ Literary Image

The year2004was called "Henry James’ year", because "Henry" became the maincharacter in a lot of novels published that year, arousing the attention of the academiccircle at home and abroad. Henry James, regarded as one of the key figures of realismliterary and modernism, played a significant part in literary history. Different fromtraditional writers, he applied in his novels imaginative uses of point of view, interiormonologue and possibly unreliable narrations in his own novels and tales brought a newdepth and interest to narrative fictions. Moreover, Henry James was an extraordinarilyproductive writer due to his voluminous works of fiction. He published articles and booksof travel, biography, autobiography, criticism, and plays, all of which made him a greatmaster in literature. With the increasing social wealth as well as a growing number ofreaders in the machine era in the1900s, the creation of Elite Literary met with the impactof the commercial tide. As a result, like his contemporaries in that era, Henry James had tomake choices between elitism and commercialism. And fortunately, the brave decisions hemade turned out to be one of the important reasons why numerous novelists paid muchattention to him, and also became the literary legacy to generations to come.This thesis aims to compare the three successful works: the British writer DavidLodge’s Author, Author,the Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s The Master, and the most famousbiography Henry James, A Life by Leon Edel, and analyze how the two different types ofwriting, namely, biographies and novels, attempt to shape three completely different HenryJames. In this thesis, the first and the second chapters try to analyze how each of the threebooks shaped an image of Henry James and constructed a time and a space he lived in bycharacterizing, rearranging the scenes and using narrative techniques based on theauthentic characters, letters and Henry’s composing process. The third chapter summarizesthe reasons why Henry James, A Life and Master were very successful while Author,Author was a failure. It uses a universal standard for the judgement of outstanding literaryworks to evaluate the three books, thus exploring the epoch-making significance of reshaping the image of Henry James as well as the spiritual legay that Henry has left to thelater academic community.